Privateer Tales 3: Parley by Jamie McFarlane

said.
    Marny winked at Loo. “That’s the spirit.” Qiu wasn’t completely sure what to make of her comment.
    “We’ll be ready to go in ten days unless there are delays on the repair.” I said.
    “What if you still can’t find a load?” Qiu asked.
    “I’ll make it work. Worst case is we leave the tug behind.”
    “Seems like that’d be a good idea in either case,” she said.
    “Not your call, Lieutenant. I’ll stay out of your business if you stay out of mine.”
    “Understood. Anything else?” she asked.
    We all stood with her and I extended my hand as a friendly gesture. She was hesitant but accepted it. “See you in ten days,” I said.
    We all watched her exit the bridge and I gave a sigh, then said. “Let me spend some time working on loads, then I’ll come find you guys.”
    I still couldn’t see any perfect matches for our load configuration. If I was willing to deadhead the tug to Delta there was a two-barge string that needed to come back. Delta was a lot closer to Jeratorn than Mars, but it was a weak proposition.
    Filling Sterra's Gift was going to be ridiculously easy. There was enough material headed to Jeratorn to fill our cargo hold at least twice and we’d make decent money on each trip. I suspected the recent pirate activity on the station description in TradeNet was causing most captains to avoid it. I’d keep looking during the next ten days to see if I could get the tug a load.
    I walked back to Nick and Marny’s quarters. Nick looked up from a reading pad he had sitting on the small table. I sat on the comfortable L shaped couch that partially surrounded it.
    “What else do we need to accomplish?” he asked.
    “This’d be the perfect time to work on our team skills. Also, you boys are a little soft. We need to get you into an exercise regimen,” Marny said, completely serious.
    Nick and I looked at each other and started laughing.
    “So, let me get this straight. When Nick says shore leave, your immediate thought is to get us into better shape? Are you sure you’ve been on leave before?” It felt good to laugh.
    Marny looked at us skeptically. “We can still enjoy ourselves, I just want a small budget, and four hours a day.”
    “Four hours?” I was flabbergasted.
    “How much budget?” Nick sat up straighter.
    “I could get by with three hours and squeeze it all in for thirty-five hundred.”
    “You’re serious?” I asked.
    “Oh, come on, Cap. Tell me you wouldn’t like to be on the giving side once in a fight instead of on the receiving side.”
    “Okay,” Nick agreed.
    Damn his infatuated little ass. “Start Monday?” I could at least negotiate.
    “Sunday. I promise if Tabby is who you’ve described, she won’t want to miss day one.”
    I groaned. “What time on Sunday?”

SHORE LEAVE
     
    Planet-side, in the town of Coolidge, it was 2200 local time on Friday night. Marny explained that the locals used the position of the Sun to adjust their clocks so midday was always 1200 and midnight was 2400. Moreover, they used a twelve hour clock that reset at those two points. I couldn’t have come up with a more ridiculous idea if I’d tried, but Marny insisted that’s how it worked.
    The naval shipyard was connected to Coolidge by the same type of elevator / tether that most modern space ports deployed. While Sterra's Gift was capable of landing on Mars, we left her at the shipyard for repairs and upgrades.
    The physics of a space elevator is terrifying. Each pod is a relatively small, four meter round, three meter tall capsule. Once loaded, it simply drops, in vacuum, accelerated by magnetic fields. A local gravity generator keeps the inhabitants stuck to the floor and magnetic forces keep the pod from touching the sides of the elevator.
    The Coolidge Naval Yard was in orbit at five hundred twenty kilometers. From that elevation, it was a ten minute ride to the planet's surface. With Sterra's Gift in the shipyard, the elevator was an inexpensive way to